The Master by Colm Tóibín Page A

domestic order, his young friend Jonathan Sturges came with news,
and he was soon followed by Edmund Gosse with the same news. It concerned Oscar Wilde.
    Wilde had been much on Henry’s mind over the previous months. His two plays were still running at the Haymarket and the St James’s. Henry had no difficulty adding up the money Wilde
had been making. He wrote to William about it, noting one of the new phenomena of London life, the inescapable Oscar Wilde, suddenly successful rather than preposterous, suddenly industrious and
serious rather than someone busy wasting his time and that of others.
    Both Sturges and Gosse offered information, however, which Henry did not pass on to William nor indeed to anyone else. Both his friends enjoyed knowing and telling fresh news and he allowed each
to feel that he was the first, partly because he was not sure that he wanted either of them to know that the antics of Oscar Wilde were matters much discussed under his roof.
    Even before he went to Ireland, Henry had heard that Wilde had abandoned all due discretion. He was doing as he pleased in London and telling whomsoever he pleased about it. He was everywhere,
flaunting his money, his new success and fame, and flaunting also the son of the Marquess of Queensberry, a boy as deeply unpleasant as his father, in Gosse’s opinion, but rather
better-looking, Sturges allowed himself to admit.
    Henry presumed that what was relayed to him by his two visitors was known to all. He knew that Wilde’s relationship with Queensberry’s son was common knowledge, but both Sturges and
Gosse appeared to feel that they and a mere few others knew the details, and the details, they insisted, were so appalling they could scarcely be whispered. Henry watched them calmly and ordered
tea for them and listened carefully to their delicate phrasing of matters which were not, to say the least, very delicate. Boys from the street, Gosse called them, but Sturges amused him more by
mentioning, sotto voce, young men whose abode was not very fixed.
    ‘He orders them as you would a cab,’ Gosse finally made himself clear.
    ‘For payment?’ Henry asked innocently.
    As Gosse nodded gravely, Henry was tempted to smile, but he too remained grave.
    It did not strike him as odd or shocking; everything about Wilde, from the moment Henry had first seen him, even when he had met him in Washington in the house of Clover Adams, suggested deep
levels and layers of hiddenness. Had Gosse or Sturges told him that Wilde went out every night dressed as a clergyman’s wife to give alms to the poor, it would not have surprised him. He
remembered something vague being told to him about Wilde’s parents, his mother’s madness or her revolutionary spirit, or both, and his father’s philandering or perhaps, indeed, his revolutionary spirit. Ireland, he supposed, was too small for someone like Wilde, yet he had always carried a threat of Ireland with him. Even London could not contain him with two plays
and many rumours all running at the same time.
    ‘Where is Wilde’s wife?’ he asked Gosse.
    ‘At home waiting for him, with unpaid bills everywhere and two young sons.’
    Henry could not picture Mrs Wilde and did not think he had ever met her. He did not even know, nor did Gosse, whether she was Irish or not. But the idea of the two boys, who looked like angels,
Gosse had assured him, struck him forcibly. He imagined the two sons waiting for their monstrous father to return and was glad he did not know their names. He thought of them, both unaware of their
father’s reputation, yet slowly gathering an impression of him and longing for him now that he was away.
    Despite the fact that he believed, as the gossip came his way, that he had the measure of Wilde, he held his breath and moved about the room in silence when Gosse told him that Wilde was suing
the Marquess of Queensberry in open court for calling him a sodomite.
    ‘It seems that he could not even spell